Overview

Gooru is a platform that provides teachers and students with the ability to search for and develop collections of multimedia resources, digital textbooks, videos, handouts, games, and quizzes, specifically around science, math and social studies and language arts. The materials are most suitable for students in grades K - 12.

In essence, Gooru serves three functions. First, users can search for resources on Gooru by entering a keyword and filtering by subject, grade level, standard, and/or source. Gooru has indexed millions of K-12 free and open education resources from providers such as Learnzillion, New Global Citizens, Autodesk, and NASA. Gooru has several libraries where users can easily find organized courses from these sources: the Community Library curated by users, Partner Libraries curated by content partners, and Standards Library with Common-Core aligned courses.

Second, Gooru provides a mechanism for teachers and students to gather and grow collections of content. Gooru users can put together “collections” and populate them by dragging and dropping resources and questions from the search page or uploading their own documents or web URLs. Collections can be made private or public, and if public, can be search for by the Gooru community (such as this collection on the Silk Road).

Third, Gooru allows a teacher to view collection analytics to track the students in their class as they move through the collections they’ve been assigned. Classes can be “open” shared via link or Class Code, or invite-only. When students join the class, they can give permission for the teacher to view their progress.

Adjacently to these search and organization capabilities, Gooru provides additional tools aiming to serve the needs of both individual students and larger classes. An individual student can log onto Gooru by providing a working e-mail; he or she can use the search feature, organize resources by collections, and self-assess with quizzes found on the Gooru search platform. Gooru tracks the student’s topics and performance on these assessments, and suggests additional resources to help them achieve mastery of a topic. Teachers can also tailor collections to larger classes. After teachers create a Class on Gooru, they can invite specific students to join then use the page to assign collections, conduct quizzes, and gather assignments from students.

For teachers, Gooru also provides a rich store of lesson plans, digital resources, and other materials for curriculum design. There are a number of ways that teachers can customize content on Gooru: they can upload their own materials, add multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions, and edit video times to be shown. Groups of educators can work togetherby collaborating on collections or by building digital libraries within schools, districts, and the Gooru community at large.

Founder Prasad Ram (aka Pram) devised a prototype of Gooru when he was working at Google. He left the networking giant to develop Gooru full-time with a mission to “honor the human right to education.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Gooru is completely free for usage. Over the last three years, Gooru has been gradually populating its collections and gathering funding from a number of entities, including the Gates Foundation Hewlett Foundation, Google, Office of Naval Research, and the Next Generation Learning Challenge. It continues to add more content and features, especially around community-building and analytics in the coming months.

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(In Summit Reflections, educators review tools that they have seen at an EdSurge Tech for Schools Summit. Summit Reflections can only be completed onsite at the event; reviewers are incentivized to leave reviews.)